Sorting Letters

You know we have to do something about Osier Lodge.

She reads the text several times, taking a second to realise it’s from her brother.

The kettle finishes boiling, the teabag and sugars are already in the mug, but she’s not moving.

It is seeing Connor’s name as the sender, and not the message itself, that makes her stop and stand. Her head feels too heavy, craned over, staring at this screen. The rest of her body is suddenly weightless, flimsy. Breathing is enough to make her sway; slowly blinking eyelids keep precarious balance. She’s trying to register this feeling.

She hits upon it. Her brother is referring to their family home by its name. She wonders: does everyone read words in the voice of the sender? Or does each person develop a single, ambiguous, un-attributable voice that they use for all correspondence?

In her brother’s voice, the message sounds like a child addressing a parent by their first name. The distance between speaker and subject feels malicious.

Standing in her kitchen, 350 miles away from the home in question, it has plucked at some unpleasant chord behind her eyes. It takes her a second to place the feeling, which has delivered to her a whole world in a capsule of déjà vu – vivid, but short-lived.

The capsule contains the faded colours and frequently reimagined shapes of childhood, but it’s spliced with something unwelcome and garish. A feeling that is as unwelcome now as it was then.

She remembers late mornings in their home, when the postman would come by. Weekends, holidays and probably too-numerous days where she’d played sick. No matter how chronic her nondescript pains, she could always muster energy for this task.

She’d gather the letters from the doormat and sort them according to recipient. Roughly 65% was unsolicited junk mail and catalogues, which, with an audible sigh she hoped sounded like domestic savvy, she’d place in their own pile next to the recycling. The others, she would lay out on the coffee table in a particular order, which reflected her family’s average daily volume of mail. In descending order: Mom, Grandad, Dad and Connor.

As of last week, all but the latter are dead now, and Connor is getting all their mail.

Her elders picked up on the in-house postal system fairly quickly and would reach for their pile without hesitating. Connor’s inability to clock on was, for her a quiet source of one-upmanship.

It was while sorting these envelopes that this ocular twinge took place. When she came across a letter addressed to Doctor Hargrove, or, worse Dr. Hargrove.

She didn’t know the word uncanny then.

Looking back at it now, it strikes her as an astonishingly complex set of emotions for a child to have. But no, she thinks, that is a silly, adult’s way of looking at it. Do we really think children walk around empty until we fill their heads with titbits, shapes, colours, times-tables, photosynthesis? Children aren’t vessels, they’re unexposed film that reacts to every flicker. Maybe this explains the bleaching affects of ageing.

How befitting then, for children to have such acute sense of the uncanny. It is silly adults’ finest example of providing an insufficient word for an inexpressible feeling.

She had moved out at the usual age and, after what they must have felt was a respectful cooling off period, her Mom and Dad began openly discussing parenting techniques. It would crop up at birthday get-togethers, during the Christmas pilgrimages or, just once, in an overheard post-breakup phonecall between her Mom and Connor.

In these moments, she would look at Connor, who would be nodding like a respectful mentee, while she herself batted away every piece of advice as a shameful admission of forethought. Like being told, decades in to a marriage, that you had been hooked but their usual chat-up line.

Her parents were early adopters of conscious work/life separation. It worked a charm for them; they would highly recommend it to any new family. These conversations followed a common structure. Emerging from a remark on education policy, or maiden names, or supermarket etiquette or unisex changing rooms, the point would flow neatly into “Well, you know, your Dad and I…” followed by a list of benefits, and ending in a funny anecdote about the mishaps of maintaining an ‘office backpack’ and a ‘home backpack’, or about the hurried, giggling pavement diversions to avoid professional acquaintances.

She can’t blame them for planning ahead, her Mom’s job wasn’t something you could carelessly bring home and spread across the dining room table. She imagines her Mom on the doorstep, folding and pocketing the day’s events, stepping back into Mom and Wife. Only when the house was asleep would she allow those doors to reopen, to be submerged in the gruesome truths of other houses, other families.

Naturally, any non-domestic mail would go directly to her parents’ places of work. Her Mom never discussed cases ‘at the table’, and Dad would never go by his professional title outside the practice. The letters that she reluctantly sorted into her Dad’s pile (but always at the bottom) were handwritten and thick with Hallmark thank yous and season’s greetings.

It wasn’t the secrecy that bothered her, it wasn’t the withheld information, it was the very real fact that her Dad was not just hers.

He belonged to every single devout person in the community, older ladies and scribbling, helicoptered infants who knew their Doctor’s home address and felt entitled to write to him.

He was simultaneously her Dad and also completely some other person, a someone she couldn’t know. She was his little girl and yet not the only little girl who he smiled down to, or who looked up to him. He fretted over other children’s aching tummies and high temperatures, he appeased them with sympathetic eyes and syrupy medicine.

Is it not the uncanny that a child feels when they learn the first name of their teacher? The discovery that they are both teacher and a fully formed other. The mirror of this must be equally disturbing, when a pupil refers to the teacher by their first name. Their self-image of a fully formed human is momentarily, yet devastatingly split, they are revealed. Which is their secret identity? Surely it cannot be both? They are exposed: duplicitous, not wholly both and therefore: neither.

The Doctor. Her Doctor. Her Dad.

He cannot have been both. So, was he neither?

As a child, the thought would disembody her. But then, as a child, she would bury the offending envelopes, and forget.

Thinking of it now, it stings more. She knows full well that she has allowed Connor to take the brunt of their Dad’s death. And he has taken the role brilliantly, the dutiful older brother. Until now she’s taken for granted that this is because he is wiser, more experienced, better at the admin. When their Mom died, Connor and his wife had been beside their Dad throughout the whole process – ‘death admin’, as they called it.

But now, what was her excuse? She wasn’t ‘too young’ anymore, unless she wanted to plea emotional immaturity – her witnesses an endless steam of ex partners and 6-month tenancy contracts.

She thinks now of the coffee table at Connor’s family home, the fashionable upcycled pallet his wife had ‘just put together’. Would they have a separate pile for condolence letters? Is their mantelpiece littered with lilac, inoffensive commiserations? Nearly every one would refer to Doctor Hargrove. She imagines the weight of these gushings, the result of 45 years of accumulated, devoted patients.

Suddenly this thought shoots a fury through her. She wants to Return to Sender every single one of these cards, with a note: he doesn’t need you, or maybe just recipient not recognised. These people only wanted him for the role he filled in their lives, a person neatly boxed in under flimsy ceiling tiles. Third on the right as usual madam, for your convenience. They only valued him as a soundboard for their aches and pains. He was their confessional box; the man behind the grate was interchangeable.

She picks up the phone and taps out a response, deletes it, retypes it.

Is that the Doctor’s house?

She locks her phone to stop herself from hitting send. She’s being petulant and she knows it. She’ll sleep it off. She marks Connor’s message as unread and heads to her room.

She congratulates herself for abandoning the evening dose of caffeine in favour of bed. She doesn’t feel enticed by a slouched evening with housemates, making small talk and pretending to care about the strangers on TV. It’s possible she never has.

In bed she lies with a closed book on her chest for half an hour, then picks up her phone and initiates a scattergun of conversations. Finally, she goes back into Connor’s message.

Does Connor not realise the salt-rubbing affects of his words?

Can he not see that she hasn’t yet reassigned the word ‘home’? His taking up of the mantle of ‘father’ hasn’t changed her role in their family. Their family is still the family, her origin and so far only fully realised narrative. The rest of her is jottings in the margins, scattered across a decidedly un-curated collection of cities, flats, jobs, other peoples lives in which she played walk-on parts.

If ‘adult’ doesn’t cut it, did she miss a cue for an advanced identity? An answer comes to her sharply: she never stepped forward to collect the unsticky, sometime label of Aunt. Her coffee table is missing the badly crayoned birthday cards and her phone empty of video messages burbled through chubby cheeks and bubbling lips.

She imagines Connor using the same line of logic when his little boy was only freshly peeled: had his sister’s baby shower invite got lost in the mail? Where were her late night texts nearing the due date? Where was her excitement for even this infrequent, cushy prototype motherhood?

The thought had never crossed her mind. She’d always assumed these domestic roles evolved organically, greatness thrust upon and all that.

They say you fall in love; say I do to marriage; babies are a happy surprise.

Sure, their parents had constructed their life around the family, with even Grandad referring to the heads of the house as ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’. But had her brother’s baby been planned? Connor had probably spoken to her parents a thousand times about it, both differently qualified to dish out medical and socio-economic advice.

Connor must have had stepped into the role of Father with his credentials as Son still in his back pocket. Or does the second face slip over the first like a new layer of oil on gears?

Despite the enforced naming convention, their Mom was no doubt laced with Daughter until Grandad’s death diluted her completely. At some point, the man who would become their Dad had carved the title Doctor before his name. As if it took precedence.

Those two, insufficient letters still bring an ache to her chest: ‘Dr.’, like a happy anecdote too abruptly ended.

With the deeds to their home up for grabs, the final stitches in the family tapestry would be snapped, and behind it would sit only a house. A light and airy 4-bed Georgian property, perfect for a growing family looking to get out of the city. Those family labels, sometimes duplicitous but nonetheless sturdy, she still relies upon those for context. In a matter of months or weeks, Connor’s pragmatic efficiency will have them dusted away and painted over in neutral magnolia.

She’s been kidding herself that Connor and she were the remaining family – the ones that the dead are ‘survived by’. But she knows he doesn’t see it that way. Who’s ever heard of a family consisting solely of ‘father’ and ‘sister’?

If she’d known, she’d have hurried to build herself a new role, or at least get some scaffolding up. She’s seriously behind; she doesn’t have the tools, or even the catalogue to buy such tools. Maybe with her share of the sale she could invest in some sort of grounding character feature, she could fund an internship; move into a studio flat with a full cutlery set; cement friendships with thoughtful gifts; splash out on dates so they don’t think she’s uninterested.

For now, something flat-pack would do for now, a flimsy Wendy house of an identity to get her through to the exchange date.